With the current state of available home wireless network technology, there are significant limitations to delivering a quality video experience. Customers often experience intermittent interference and less than optimal throughput over typical wireless networks. When not used for video, performance issues with wireless networks often go unnoticed, because non-video uses rarely push the limits of a wireless network's performance capabilities. For example, web pages continue to load and email is still sent via a network operating at less than full capacity. The fact that there may have been a short-term glitch, or that the maximum possible bandwidth is momentarily unavailable, causes only minor degradations in the experience.
Streaming high fidelity multimedia (e.g., video and audio) data over a typical home wireless network pushes existing affordable and widely available wireless home networking technologies to their limits. Because of this, even relatively minor transmission/reception issues result in effects that may be described as “glitchy,” “jerky,” “stop-and-start,” and the like. Since these effects are easily noticed by the customers, multimedia electronics producers and data service providers strive to reduce the occurrence of glitches.
However, often there are many practical actions that a customer can take which will affect the overall performance of a wireless networking environment. For example, fine adjustments to and placement of wireless equipment can affect the overall performance. Unfortunately, the customer typically does not know what action can be taken to prevent or ameliorate performance issues in a glitch-prone wireless networking environment.
Conventionally, a customer does not know if there is a problem with network throughput. The customer does not know what network changes to make that may actually improve throughput. Furthermore, the customer is unable to actively monitor the network throughput in order to see the effects of making network changes.